Mentoring Young Adults – Ken’s Mentoring Moments for the day

Hello fellow Mentors! Mentoring young adults means having to look at our own selves and learn for our Mentoring Moments.

Today's Mentoring Moment: A happy pinball and a sore thumb.

Those of you who know me, know that I am a bit of a pinball fanatic. I say "a bit" because I know people who have added an extra garage to display a bajillion pinball machines.
I am happy with 7. If I wish to get another, I have to sell one.

Pinball is like life. You take your best shot at something (the plunger) and it may start well or it may start badly. The physics of the ball, the obstacles it encounters can all be dealt with by a stream of copiousness of "Being in the moment". Sometimes it goes right down the crapper anyways. Maybe you learn something, maybe it was just a bad ball but you keep on.

None of that has anything to do with today's mentoring moment, I just wanted to share that with you 🙂

Mentoring Moment of the day. I recently bought the sweetest pinball with one of the ugliest looking backglasses (the thing the lights up at the back of machine with the scores on it) called World Poker Tour. Turns out, you can buy new artwork from the place in the Netherlands. There are tasteful images, Playboy quality images, and Hustler quality images. We went for tasteful (I'm old fashioned that way).

My new artwork arrives and it looks awesome! I take out the backglass and the plastic pieces that hold the offending image won't budge. I email the Netherlands and ask how do you install it? The reply "yew take oot the plastics and yew poot in da picture!". Not very helpful. I call my local truly obsessed pinball buddy (something like 40 pinballs and counting). He tells me I can get new parts in town (90 minutes away). I call the place and they tell me the plastics should just slide right off but sometimes people but two sides tape in there and it can get sticky.

Here comes the mentoring moment. Undaunted and knowing I can buy new plastics, I bring my trusty exactoknife to the task and it starts to give way! I slice this way. I slice that way and I am getting excited that this little backglass that has daunted me and forced me to continue to behold it's crappiness would soon be no more. Then it happened. The voice in my head said "you are not being careful and you might get caught". Pshaw! I said! Ugly backlass must be destroyed!! Of course, four seconds later, I slashed the crap out my thumb. (sigh).

All I could say was, Yes.. voice in my head. I shall listen to you the next time even if I am about to get something that had beguiled me for a while.

I spend so much time mentoring young adults to first teach the voice in their heads to stop being evil, fearful voice and become a helping coach. It is another level to know when the voice is helping. A third level when the voice is inspiring. Don't let crappy backglasses stop you from learning to listen to that voice. (One thumb up).